On the night of 3 to 4 July 1941, seven aircraft and crews of the Polish 301 Squadron took part in an attack on targets in Bremen. Vickers Wellington R1492 took off with a crew of six from Syerston air base at 22:53. The 44-year-old Group Captain Boleslaw Feliks Stachoń was the special co-pilot of the aircraft. In the First World War and the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Bolshevik wars that followed, he served in the Polish army. In the 1920s he learned to fly and functions in that field followed. At the outbreak of the Second World War he commanded the air defence and air component of the Pomeranian army of the Polish armed forces. He fled to England via Romania and France, where he fulfilled various functions and in July 1941 commanded both the Polish 300 and 301 Squadrons. Indications from a radar position led the German Messerschmitt Bf 110 night fighter, flown by the experienced Oberleutnant Helmut Lent, through the dark night to the Wellington. Around 00:30 he got the aircraft in his sights and managed to shoot the left wing on fire with one salvo. Stachoń was most likely also hit by this salvo. The five other crew members managed to get out of the stricken aircraft and descended with their parachutes and landed at Vlagtwedde and 2e Exloërmond.

Flying Officer WacławButkiewicz, Flying Officer Julian Stefan Palka, Sergeant Antoni KazimierzDydo, SergeantZbigniewIdzikowski and Sergeant Zdzisław Dzięgiel were immediately taken prisoner.

The Wellington crashed in flames in 1e Exloërmond. Stachoń's body was recovered from the wreck and subsequently buried in 2e Exloërmond. In 1962 he was reburied in the Polish military cemetery in Breda. The stone that had covered his grave is now left as a monument in the former mortuary at the cemetery.

The remaining five crew members survived almost four years in German captivity and returned to England in 1945, where they stayed and built their lives. None of them returned to their homeland, where the communists were in power.